Garden of Earthly Delights

Songs of experience.

I was at a party, and a tall young man was stroking the head of a golden retriever, and the dog was clear when a smell was more interesting than being adored. The tall young man said, “Unrequited love, the story of my life.” I said, “It’s the story of everyone’s life.” He said, “Really?” And we sat together on the steps of a porch, drinking champagne. I said, “Desire fulfilled is desire destroyed.” He said, “So true.” I said, “The Way We Were.” He said, “Ka-ka-ka-aty.” I said, “We’re Barbra Streisand, and there‘s something to be said for never actually getting with Hubble, who isn’t there. A shadowy man is an image factory.” The young man said he was going on a cruise as part of the crew for a month between places to live, and I could see in the manner he was living a way we are all looking to live, which is the way a dog lives. Everyone at the party loved the dog, who thought being loved was the same as finding a half-dead beetle you like the squiggle of and knock around with your paw. Everyone could see in the dog a kind of longing not to carry around the stupid waste of being human. Everyone came together in this understanding.

A detail from “The Garden of Earthly Delights” by Hieronymus Bosch

When people talk about "facing reality," they mean the things that give you pleasure can kill you. I remember seventeen and waking up in the apartment of a friend. I remember the pout on the boy who didn’t love me. I remember holding onto the feeling of suspension. I mean holding onto desire that was doomed because inside the doom was disbelief in doom. I remember getting dressed as the boy watched from the bed. I remember walking to the Museum of Modern Art to meet another boy I wanted less. I remember the languid indifference of the boy on the bed and the desire I felt independent of anything he did or said. I remember knowing this would give me my life and also shift over to make room as other desires formed. When I watch My Brilliant Friend, these are the associations that come to mind.

When I met you, at 75, I remember imagining, from the way you talked and from the range of your experiences, what would have happened to us back then. Back then, I would have had sex with you and it would have been good. I would have thought it was good because I was into the look of you and I thought what was good between us had also made you happy. I would have slipped beside you at a party. I would have thought from the way we were talking I had nothing to fear. Fear wasn’t that much a part of things back then. I would have rested my head in the crook of your arm and thought I should relax. After you got up from the bed, you might have given me a small thought as you were getting dressed, or hailing a cab, or lighting a smoke. I would never see you again, and I would remember you for the rest of my life. I would remember you because of the space between what had happened to me and what had happened to you. I would remember you because it would flash on me for a moment I had been so wrong about us it was funny. I cannot fully express how happy it makes me to tell you this can never happen to me again.

A little while ago I was chopping a terrifying mass of vegetables we got from a nearby farm, and I thought about a message I’d sent to a friend and worried it might be unwelcome. Then I heard myself say, “Say what you would say if you thought you were going to die.” I wondered if this was something only a person my age would tell herself. I think I wouldn’t have had this thought in my forties or fifties, but how would I know? Actually, I could know. I could read old notebooks. Am I going to do that? I am not going to do that. I feel separated from my earlier self in a way that’s enjoyable.

It’s been raining for a day. All the cats and dogs of summer are falling from a stalled, gray cloud—the beautiful color of indeterminacy. The trees have stopped shedding leaves. The grass is an electric green, and a field of white mushrooms that can probably kill you has sprung up over night. The dahlias are saying, We have only fifteen minutes left to bloom, but for you, darling, we’ll keep going.

Film director Ruben Östlund

Richard and I watched Triangle of Sadness, by Ruben Östlund—the director of two other movies I liked, The Square and Force Majeure. The thing with Östlund is he holds a shot for a long time, and the camera is often not on the thing happening but on the face of someone watching a thing you can't see. Triangle of Sadness is an essay, not a narrative. It's an essay the way many of Godard's films are essays about a topic he wants to pick at or turn around in light.

The term "triangle of sadness" refers to the space between the eyebrows and the forehead, where Botox smooths out the annoyances of time. The movie is a series of chunks with little titles, similar to the little chunks and titles in The Worst Person in the World," another excellent film by another Scandinavian director, Joachim Trier. The chunks in the Östlund film are variations on power, including a brilliant reversal of fortune after a shipwreck when the bottom becomes the top.

Östlund looks at who has power and why they have power in any shifting context and even in any frame of a film. In one segment, there's a crazy long sequence between a gorgeous young man and a gorgeous young woman about who should pick up the check in a restaurant they're eating at. Sometimes the power is about the sex you are, sometimes about the skills you have, sometimes (most of the time) about the amount of money you have, about the amount of beauty you have, about the amount of sexiness you have, about the amount of time you have left to live. The movie is fun to watch. It’s smart and weird and not really beautiful because it's too jagged. Maybe there are mistakes, but I didn't find any.

Last week, I met a friend at a bar in Brooklyn. We started as friends on Facebook. There was something about her I sensed would click before we met. I am eighty percent right about these things.

The place was filled with people my friend described as “hipsters” and “aging hipsters.” She said, “I am an aging hipster.” Actually, she is hip in the old sense of the word. We drank a certain kind of margarita and ate expensive plates of tiny food. The margaritas were served in old-fashioned glasses with sprigs of rosemary and salt along the rims. The buzz made me even happier than I was just being there.

Our waitperson had the same face as Tom Petty. She was tall and rangy with splashes of purple in her blond shag. I said to her, “You have the most fantastic shoulders I have ever seen.” She looked held up by a giant wooden hanger. She said, “If I wear shoulder pads, I look like a linebacker.” I said, “I would love to have shoulders like that. You look like you’re saying to the world, ‘Don’t even think about it’.” She smiled and said, “Thanks.” My friend and I ordered a third margarita to share and talked about people we loved who were dead. We didn’t have enough time to get through them all.

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Guest writer Richard Toon looking at a plaque in Central Park

Lancashire, a guest post by Richard Toon

I have finished reading The Famished Road (1991), Ben Okri’s extraordinary novel about a child growing up in Nigeria as it becomes an independent, modern state—yet one still suffused with Yoruban magical thought. In the child’s way of seeing, the imagined world and the real world are not distinguishable. Life is experienced as a form of magical realism you don’t wake up from until adulthood.

I have no direct connection to this world, and yet through my memories of childhood in Bury, Lancashire, I feel a common sense of the phantasmagoric. In 1955, when I was five, I caught a virulent form of chicken pox and fell into a delirium. The delirium produced synesthesia and intense hallucinations. I could smell words and hear shadows. 

It occurs to me now that our move from Leicester in the midlands to a working-class, northern town was a form of time travel to me that was disorienting. Leicester was a town on the way up. Our new, semi-detached house there was in a suburb. Under the Labour government, a visiting nurse pulled up to see us in her Morris Minor, dispensing rose-hip syrup and orange juice. My siblings and I went to the state-financed nursery school from the age of three. All these were benefits of being “Bevin’s Babies.”

Then we moved to Bury. Owing to tradition and neglect, this town was still largely a relic of the Nineteenth Century. The dark satanic mills still produced cotton, leather, and steel. The streets were cobbled, as were the school playgrounds. Gas lamps lit the streets. Brewer’s dray horses delivered beer to my grandfather’s pub. Mill workers wore wooden clogs. Men wore flat caps and the women wore knitted shawls. I was taught to write at All Saint’s infant school, using a metal stylus I scratching on a piece of slate. 

The adjustment to this reversal of time was probably more disturbing than I realized back then. I have a vivid memory of first seeing the cobbled school playground that sloped down to the canal, green with slime, and thinking this is no place to play. Adults spoke a language (actually, they just used an accent) I could hardly understand, and the local kids thought us children from the south “had it soft.” It was also a place of happy memories and love. The singing from the men in the bar and the women in the snug wafted up the stairs as I lay in bed.

The point is, from reading Okri, I’ve rediscovered the meaning of magical thinking in my own life as well as encountering his. I keep finding connections to the ways the real and the magical were joined in my experience. My dad, a most reasonable and rational person, comes from the place of stability. With his background in Leicester, he radiates post-war optimism. My mother, born in the Bury she returned to less than a decade after leaving it, is the one who told me fairy stories and stories of ghosts she’d seen, especially the ghosts of friends who’d died as children of diphtheria and scarlet fever. 

Both these forces were active inside me. So, no wonder that in the delirium I experienced at 22 Tottington Road, ghosts from the last century emerged from the walls on both sides of the bed, wearing their period clothes of long black skirts for the women and long black coats for the men. In a continuous procession, these figures walked solemnly toward me and dived into my chest, where they’ve stayed.         

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